Great quotes from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds | Hacker News Reader

Great quotes from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds

royal.pingdom.com

38 pointsiseff18 comments

RE: Bill Gates, 1983: "We will never make a 32-bit operating system."

I have to admire a guy that makes a mental mistake (or rather, limits himself, as in this case), and then goes full-on to prove himself wrong.

I think if you were to look at quotes of people who failed, you would see shortsighted statements like these, with the huge difference that they never changed their minds. They held their ground all the way down to failure (Sun comes to mind, there are countless others).

So I see these statements here as badges of honor of these greatly successful people. It takes a big man to say something and hold your ground, but it takes an even bigger man to recognize you were wrong and then pursue a course of action that contradicts what you used to think. Not only that, but with the conviction that they have. Cool quotes.

PS: And let him who has never guessed wrong cast the first stone.

PS2: The Linus quote about masturbating monkeys made me spit out my coffee :-)

The list has a BIT of bias against Gates. Jobs gets to be humorous and bright and dead-on. Linus gets to be hilarious and geeky. Bill Gates gets to be evil and dead wrong.

Yes, I read that too. There are some pretty classic Gates quotes, but many weren't on there. My favorite: "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."

Nah, that's not him. I forget who it's cited to, but that's a misquote.

Doesn't make it a lie.

I completely lost interest when I understood that the only quotes about Bill Gates are those selected to make him look like a fool. How original another hit job on Bill by some computer cheerleaders, yeah! I didn't even continue to the Linus ones, there is no point.

The quote "Do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" by Torvalds is not from 2001. Its around the early 90s.

Exactly.

  From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
  Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
  Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
  Message-ID: <1991Oct5.054106.4647@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
  Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
  Organization: University of Helsinki

  Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
  their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying

</quote> http://www.educ.umu.se/~bjorn/linux/misc/linux-history.html

2001 is a dead-tree version's reference:

Torvalds, Linus and David Diamond (2001). Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, Collins. </quote> http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

By the way,

Talk is cheap. Show me the code. </quote> http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/25/132

This quote is not from 2006 but at least 2000.

My favorite of all of them, from Linus:

1996

Some people have told me they don’t think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They’d be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." is my favorite quote of all time and of all people.

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important "operating system, and possibly program, of all time." - Bill Gates, 1987

This reminded me of an old t-shirt my dad had, wish I could find it: "Flight 4.0 to Chicago has been delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2"

The 4.0 and Chicago referring to Windows 95.

If Richard Stallman sees this, he's gonna be pissed :)

yeah lets go bash microsoft more and be one sided again! yeah! hey, hold on, let me read that arrogant and unrealistic post by 37 signals in the meantime...brb...

Linus Torvalds is my god now.

Great quotes, illustrates the personalities of all three perfectly.

Which incidentally also reflects the personalities of the three Operating Systems

Looks like Bill and Linus are pretty similar, both hardcore coders with no heart for competition, which explains why they have both been so successful. Steve is just from another planet altogether!

To be fair, all of the "world domination" quotes from Linus (oddly, the original didn't make the list) are made with tongue firmly in cheek. It's really not possible or practical for an open souce project to "compete" directly against another in the sense that Microsoft does. At worst, they snipe at each other counterproductively; at best, they share code and reimplement features trying to out-do the other.

The bit about OpenBSD is real enough though. Theo has a long history of being ... difficult, and over the past few years Linus seems to have lost patience.

Bill Gates, in 1998:

"Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don’t evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, ‘how will it help us sell more copies of Windows?’

[...]

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."

Such a great man. o_o

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